About Us

If you want to know what's happening in Dallas, keep your eye on the Observer. Since our founding in 1980, we’ve grown from a small weekly newspaper to a major force in this city, known for our hard-edged investigative stories about government, politics and business, as well as our pointed, provocative coverage of sports, music and the arts.

Along the way, we’ve collected numerous journalism awards, including first-place finishes in investigative reporting and environmental reporting in the 2015 Association of Alternative Newsmedia Awards, as well as honors from the James Beard Foundation Awards and the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists.

And we’ve rolled out some of the city’s best live events, including our massively popular St. Patrick’s Day Concert, and the Dallas Observer Brewfest, where thousands of attendees sample more than 400 beers from around the globe as well as food from local vendors and live music.

Our early embrace of the web allowed us to develop an online audience long before most alt-weeklies understood what a blog was. Today, dallasobserver.com draws more than 1 million monthly active users, while, every Thursday, 42,000 print copies land on newsstands around the city – and disappear within hours.

We’ve had some fun, too. Long before Jon Stewart started The Daily Show, the Observer was a fearless practitioner of political satire. In fact, one of our pieces of parody went all the way to the Texas Supreme Court – which ruled in our favor. As a result, humor, parody and political satire are now officially protected speech in the Lone Star State.

Today we’re part of the Voice Media Group family and an integral part of the DFW metroplex. And our sense of humor remains intact.

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